Featuring ten collage illustrations by the author,Helen Ivory's new poetry collectionConstructing a Witchfixes on the monstering and the scapegoating of women and on the fear of ageing femininity.
In this collection, the witch appears as the barren, child-eating hag; she is a lustful seductress luring men to a path of corruption; she is a powerful or cantankerous woman whose cursing must be silenced by force.These bewitching poems explore the witch archetype and the witch as human woman. They examine the nature of superstition and the necessity of magic and counter-magic to gain a fingerhold of agency, when life is chaotic and fragile. In the poems ofConstructing a WitchHelen Ivory investigates witch tourism, the witch as outsider, cultural representations of the witch, female power and disempowerment, the menopause, and how the female body has been used and misunderstood for centuries. Constructing a Witch is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
Table of Contents:
12 {By the slant of her tone}
13 The Waking
14 Some definitions of Witch
16 The lust of the goat is the bounty of God
17 Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast
18 Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?
19 Another Story
20 We are the weirdos mister
21 {daughters of air}
22 The Answer
23 Only Bad Witches Are Ugly
24 The Woman of Endor to Saul
25 Night Hag
26 One Such Tale
27 Scry
28 Day’s Conversation with Night
29 More thoughts about the dark
30 The Antihousewife
31 Dairying
32 {gnats, swarm upon swarm}
33 Remedy
34 How to Construct an Ale Witch
35 New Rules for the Disenchanted Land
36 Cackle
37 The Gift
38 Fetish to Counteract Witchcraft
39 {and thus the riddle has been read}
40 The Moon’s Halo
41 Protection Ink
42 At the Witchcraft Museum
43 Hexentanz
44 Häxan
45 The Original Bad Girl
46 To a Painter
47 All about the hair
48 More thoughts about the body
49 {a cluster of pretty berries}
50 Margaret Johnson
51 Elizabeth Tibbots
52 Lilias Adie (c. 1640-1704)
53 Walking the Witch
54 The Devil’s Mark
55 More thoughts about the Witch Finder
56 {Shall the boys come and hang, burn or roast you?}
57 Pendle Tourist
58 Bridget Bishop
59 The Good People of Salem
60 Samuel Parris Dreams of Dogs
61 The Makings
62 Witchfinder Tour
63 Mistley Pond Washes its Hands
65 {familiar spirits]
66 More thoughts about the moon
67 Prick
68 Resistance Spells
68 Spell to Take Back the Night
69 Summoning Spell: The Body
70 Disarming Spell: The Enchanter
71 {The church-bells began to ring}
72 ‘Grandmother Moorhead’s Aromatic Kitchen’
73 The Watcher
74 The Happenings
77 Hang the Moon
78 The Menstruous Woman
79 Brain Fog
80 The Change
81 ‘Invidia’ (‘Envy’)
82 {shortly after midnight}
83 Tick-Tock
84 Thirteen Million
85 This whole thing was nearly never a thing
86 34 Symptoms of the Menopause
88 Votive
89 ‘The Spirit of the Storm’
90 {fire as fire}
93 Acknowledgements
95 About the collage/poems
About the Author :
Helen Ivory is a poet and visual artist. She edits the webzine Ink Sweat and Tears, and teaches for UEA/National Centre for Writing online. She has published five collections with Bloodaxe Books: The Double Life of Clocks (2002), The Dog in the Sky (2006), The Breakfast Machine (2010), Waiting for Bluebeard (2013) and The Anatomical Venus (2019), with a sixth, Constructing a Witch, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, out in 2024. Fool's World, a collaborative Tarot with artist Tom de Freston (Gatehouse Press), won the 2016 Saboteur Best Collaborative Work award. The cover of The Anatomical Venus, which features her own artwork, won the East Anglian Writers Book by the Cover Award (East Anglian Book Awards 2019).In 2024 she received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, an award recognising the achievement and distinction of individual poets.
Review :
The Anatomical Venus is an often disturbing journey of how women have been treated by men through the ages. It is historical reportage. It is controlled and focused anger without sentiment. It is subjugation and oppression laid bare in subtle and often mesmerising ways. It is Angela Carter’s eye meets Elaine Showalter’s brain. It is dark, upsetting and erotic. And it’s laced with magic from the first page until the last. It’s the suffering of women, and women fighting back in delicious and unusual ways. It says as much, if not more, about men throughout history as it does about women. Read this book. Then read it again. And again. With each reading, The Anatomical Venus will reveal something new, like all great books do.
Historical it may well be but this collection’s contemporary relevance is searing… This collection is a stunningly curated linguistic exhibition on the historical abuse of women. Enticing and yet flinching, this disquieting house of dolls makes abuse seen and urges us to reevaluate why women are where they are now, and it does so with an eerie and unforgettable beauty.
